This is for my Biology Ecology class. I’ve uploaded the worsheet you should fill out in the files but I’ll put the instructions here as well.
Weekly Assignment: Mating Behavior
Background: Read the paper titled, “Male Mating Success and Risk of Predation in a Wolf Spider…” (I’ve uploaded a file of the paper) You only need to read the abstract (and then look at one of the graphs) to answer the questions.
Then answer the following questions:
1. What 2 traits are being affected by sexual selection in these spiders? How are these traits adaptations? Describe both traits.
2. Explain the tradeoff in sexual selection and natural selection.
3. What is the evidence that the male mating behaviors are selected against by natural selection?
4. Look at Figure 1a and 1b. What do they say about the selective advantage of the 2 mating behaviors?
5. What do you think would be a good follow-up experiment? You need to describe a complete experiment – w/ the question and hypothesis and control group, treatment group, dependent variable.
